This is a reply to article “The Millennial Internet Is Dead, and Politicians Killed It. “Social media use is declining, and what’s left has shifted from conversation to passive scrolling.” I got around to reading my paper copy of it this morning.

The article is a nice summary of the last 20 years of social media and how we got to the current morass of politicization, centralization, and deadness online. I have some perspective from a little further back of events that set the stage for the early social media era. I was on the even-more free-wheeling USENET in the 80s and worked at CompuServe (and later AOL) when section 230 was passed. The USENET “alt.” newsgroups could be created by anybody and were used for everything from serious academic, political and social discussions, to a distribution mechanism for “questionable” content, to criticism of Start Trek characters (“alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die”). It was all there.

There was recognition in the 90s, even at the congressional level, that the online world and the Internet had to be allowed to grow, and that we’d all be better off if it was left alone for a while. Section 230 was “hands off” to allow free expression online. The moratorium on taxation was legal acknowledgment that the Internet needed space to grow economically. Those were forward looking admissions that many important things in life, economics and society happen outside government and politics and need space to grow. We could use more of that today. Those allowed (for better or worse) companies such as AOL, eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook to exist. Where would we have been during the pandemic without Amazon? Love it or hate it, where would we be today without Google? The 90s were an interesting time for freedom. The iron curtain had just fallen. The Internet was new. New visions of free communication and economic independence (crypto currencies) were ascendent. In my mind, those are all good. I’m not sure how we go there now, post social media “death”, post pandemic, post “fake news” as we are moving into a world of age (identity) verification “for the children” that will further dampen free expression. “Controllers always gonna control” I guess. But even the disillusionment shows the flip side of the coin. It shows that people want freedom. And as long as that is true, there is hope. Bring on the next disruption. Now, let’s see, where is my printing press?